Love's Apogee, Its Highest Expression

What is of greatest value to you? Is it your health? Your relationships? If your answer is health, would your health have the same value without your relationships, especially your closest ones? Perhaps these questions tease the possibility of a false equivalency—apples or oranges?—but if we were forced to rank the importance of these two values, certainly it would be a very close race because of the immeasurable impact that our love relationships have on our lives.

Ironically, however, despite love's incalculable value, it is comparatively understudied, and its highest expression even less so. Defining love in a way that makes it suitable for scientific study is teeming with obstacles because it is a complex, multifaceted psychobiological phenomenon with a powerful overlay of wide-ranging cultural modifiers and influencers.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, here's what many, including myself, have argued is love's highest expression. To start, consider a personal example.

Source: Mikhail Nilov/Pexels

A Sweet Gesture

Last weekend after we'd finished our grocery shopping, my wife kindly asked me if there was anything we might have forgotten to buy or if there was something else I wanted. After a moment's thought, I blurted out, "Yeah, I haven't had black licorice in a long time." My wife nodded, acknowledging what I said, and we went on to the next item on our day's agenda. Two days later, there it was, my favorite brand of licorice. She had bought it and then affectionately placed it on my desk.

The Big Three

My wife's loving act affirmed her sensitive, respectful understanding of my need, my sweet tooth. Albeit a small gesture, it made me feel like the tiny part of me with a penchant for black licorice had been lovingly attended to. Almost without exception, each instance of my wife's sensitive, pinpointed caring pulls me—like a very agreeable gravitational tug—toward her in a refreshing renewal of affection, where I feel fully understood and warmly accepted. During these coveted moments, any distance between us dissolves instantly. For me, it's a peak, cherishable reaffirmation of my deep affection for her.

Love's "Basic Mechanics"

What does your peak love moment look like? Under which circumstances—internal and external—does your love achieve its highest expression, the very top of your love game? For many of us, it comes in a profoundly heartwarming connection with our partners or those we love the most. But to make this quality connection, what exactly takes place within us, within our partners, and between ourselves and our partners? In brief, what are the specific "love mechanics" that are key to a genuinely meaningful connection?

Again, for me, and perhaps many others, the fundamental mechanics consist of sensitive, respectful understanding, where empathy, my own and my partner's, achieves its finest, most delicately nuanced attunement to what each of us is experiencing/feeling in a particular moment.

And because of my partner's empathic, affirming response, I'm now easily disposed to boomerang the same sensitive, respectful understanding back to her and what she needs. The "math" is simple here, the importance of her needs is equal to the importance of my own. Now, love can peak in a reverberating, reciprocating give-and-take of affection, guided by a balance of self and partner understanding that is both sensitive and respectful.

"I, Thou" Connective Tissue

Surely, these peak moments of communion can form a strong, durable, and resilient connective tissue between partners that is of the highest quality. Not surprisingly, the icing on the cake is a much-desired obliteration of even a tincture of aloneness or isolation. Under love's auspices, we're allied in the most profoundly personal and meaningful way as the bond between us strengthens, like adding additional strands to a rope. Can it get any better? Not for me.

Moreover, such profound connections are most often accompanied by their usual, very welcome and reassuring emotional bedfellows, trust, acceptance, and safety, and the affirmation that my perspective can be an inviting shared reality that both my partner and I can momentarily occupy. In essence, my partner vicariously inhabits the same "personalized" reality that I currently inhabit. My experience now becomes our experience—empathy is exquisitely tuned—the connection is made; love achieves its apogee, its highest expression.

Is there a higher expression of love?